How we're putting our carbon literacy training into practice

Global warming, climate change, and carbon footprint are all terms that we’ve heard a lot. But when it came down to understanding what that actually meant, things were a little less clear. We couldn’t be more serious about our responsibility to do right by the planet, and part of that means continuing to educate ourselves on sustainability. 

By enrolling in Carbon Literacy Training as a team, we learnt so much about the impact we’re having - sometimes without even thinking about it. After having some time to reflect on what we’d learned after our full day of training, we each made pledges on how we’ll work to reduce our carbon emissions, as individuals and as a business. Here’s a sneak peek at how we’re implementing this across our team -

Design

Even though digital design may feel virtual, it still has very real effects on the environment. Large files and high-quality assets translate to significant energy use, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re updating our set of sustainable website practices, making sure these are adhered to on every single website we deliver. We’re also committing to doing the research into what best practice looks like as tools and trends continue to change. Responsible design is about being ahead of the game, rather than constantly playing catchup.

Development

The training got us thinking about the whole lifecycle of our websites. Each stage of the process - from the initial build, to hosting, to data transfer, to users interacting with the site - has a carbon cost. We already work hard to make sure that our websites meet high standards of sustainability, by measuring their carbon footprint at launch and opting for green hosting wherever possible. But there’s still room for improvement.

One way we’re doing this is by reducing energy consumption across our existing servers. Weekly reporting, monthly audits, and getting more involved with the Umbraco sustainability community will all help us keep our websites greener.

Client Services

It’s no secret that we’re always looking to perfect our process so that every project is smooth sailing. We want to use our expertise for good and use our learnings to continue supporting positive change. We’ll be more intentional about educating our clients, by adding training sessions to our project process where we’ll focus on making informed choices that help to reduce digital carbon footprint.

We’re also going to be formalising our policy on corporate gifting - we already opt for B Corp partners when it comes to sending a token of our appreciation, but we’re making this official so we can keep track of the carbon savings we’re making with more conscious choices.

Conclusion

Some carbon costs are more obvious than others. It’s easy to think of emissions as clouds of black smoke and a rising thermostat, but less easy to visualise the effect of an unnecessary email or back to back online meetings. In reality, all of the hundreds of small actions taken every day are contributing to the climate crisis, a few grams of carbon at a time. That’s why doing better is the result of changing habits and rethinking what we do, rather than big overnight transformations. And consistent and continuous education is an important step in that. We’re so proud of our team for taking responsibility for their impact on the environment and can’t wait to be a fully carbon literate organisation.